Although the notion that the First Anglo-Chinese War (or the ‘Opium War’, 1840–1842) was the dividing line between modern and pre-modern Chinese history has come under challenge, the war is still widely recognised as a fateful conflict that had profound consequences for the history of Sino-western relations. The causes of this war have been much commented upon. A former prevailing theory emphasised the irreconcilable conflict between Britain’s economic expansion and China’s containment policy. Historians of this school maintained that a war was inevitable because opium was but an instrument of British commercial expansion: ‘Had there been an effective alternative to opium, say molasses or rice, the conflict might have been called the Molasses War or the Rice War’.1 In the 1960s, John K. Fairbank advanced a revisionist theory. He believed that the fundamental reason for the Opium War was a cultural conflict between the conservative East and the progressive West.2 In 1978, Tan Chung, a Chinese historian based in India, challenged these two views. By carefully studying the triangular trade between Britain, India and China, Tan claimed that the vital importance of opium had been underestimated by previous researchers whereas the Sino-British cultural differences had been exaggerated. He concluded that the clash of socio-economic interests around the opium question should be regarded as the sole cause of the First Anglo-Chinese War.3 In addition to this war-due-to-opium theory, historians have recently advanced some specific explanations which proved complementary to Tan’s analysis. Glenn Melancon pointed out that Britain’s concern for its national honour was important to the decision to go to war with China.4 Song-Chuan Chen has added that a group of British merchants in Canton, known as the ‘warlike party’, should be held responsible for the hostilities between the two nations.5
These studies have offered wide-ranging interpretations of the origins of the Opium War. Nevertheless, a common limitation is that these researchers were all keen to provide a principal cause of the war—either trade, culture, honour or the ‘warlike party’—but they did not pay close attention to some highly relevant questions: how was the opium trade imagined and the opium question disputed, and how was the war against China justified? A war in defence of a contraband trade was difficult to justify. How then did the decision-makers in nineteenth-century Britain become convinced that this war ought to be fought? Based on a range of pamphlets, newspapers published in China, as well as the official correspondence and parliamentary debates that eventually approved the motion for war, this chapter addresses these questions. By focusing on the various views presented in relation to the opium question, rather than trying to determine which party should be blamed for provoking the war, this chapter attempts to reconstruct how exactly the opium trade and related affairs were presented and discussed before the outbreak of the war.
I
For most of the eighteenth century, opium, recognised as a form of medicine, was admitted into China on the payment of an import duty. The Jiaqing Emperor banned the trade in 1796, but the prohibition turned out to be ineffectual. The supply of opium, mostly by British merchants, increased forty-fold in four decades. Opium smoking spread rapidly in China, causing a series of problems for the Qing Government. Not only was the physical and moral welfare of the Chinese people threatened, but a vast amount of silver was flowing out of China. In this context, the Daoguang Emperor decided to adopt stringent measures, appointing Lin Zexu as imperial commissioner to eliminate the opium trade.
In fact, well before Lin was sent to Canton to adopt a hard-line approach, a controversy over the nature of opium and its trade took place among the concerned parties in both China and Britain. In 1835, the first anti-opium pamphlet was published in London.6 About a year later, The Chinese Repository in Canton began to present diverse views on the opium question. It was not until 1839, however, that this trade was brought to the forefront of public consciousness by A.S. Thelwall’s The Iniquities of the Opium Trade, which drew the nation’s attention to the deplorable effects of opium smoking. Subsequently, an Anti-Opium Society was formed. A number of pamphlets and articles followed and a debate on opium began almost simultaneously in Canton and Britain.
The nature of opium was the first subject of dispute. The principal impression introduced by the anti-opium campaigners was that opium was ‘a certain poison’,7 whose injurious effects threatened the health, morals and lives of the Chinese. Although there was a claim that opium was a valuable medicine when properly used, anti-opium activists pointed out that the drug sold by the British traders was actually ‘deficient in the sedative principle for which opium is chiefly valued’.8 Moreover, as Sir Stephen Lushington argued in the House of Commons, ‘not a thousandth part of the quantity of opium exported from India, and introduced into China, was used for medical purposes’.9 In the opinion of anti-opium campaigners, the destructive effects of this drug were beyond all doubt. They asserted that, unlike the consumption of alcohol, moderation in opium smoking was almost impossible, because once a person was induced to smoke it, ‘the habit fasten[s] itself on him so rapidly, and so forcibly, that he … becomes in a short time inveterately addicted to it’.10 In order to stress that opium was unwelcome in China, local knowledge was referred to. For instance, an author in The Chinese Repository wrote that, ‘So far as we know—and we have read and heard the sentiments of thousands of the Chinese—no one ever regards the use of the drug in any other light than as a physical and moral evil. … “It is a noxious thing,” they say, … This is truth.’11
Based on assertions about opium’s harmful nature, the anti-opium campaigners condemned the opium trade from different perspectives. First, since the opium trade was contrary to Chinese laws, it was highly injurious to the legitimate commerce that was conducted by British merchants. According to some of these observers, the contraband nature of the opium trade justified the Chinese Government’s policy of exclusion. In consequence, not only had Britain’s export of woollens and cottons declined, but the extension of Britain’s legal trade to other Chinese ports was justly debarred. Second, the opium traffic was ‘dishonourable to the Britis...